If you’re building affiliate websites, one of the most time consuming and challenging tasks is to keep adding new website content on a regular basis. And if you’re working in a market that you don’t have a personal interest in, it can be even tougher. In this article, we’re going to discuss three strategies for making your website content creation a little easier.

Autoblogging

Autoblogging is probably the most attractive option for most people. If you’re not familiar with it, autoblogging uses a WordPress plugin to grab website content from other sources, mix it together into a semi-unique post and add it to your blog, all automatically without any sort of effort on your part.

A big reason it’s so popular is because it takes virtually no effort on your part. The unfortunate thing is, if you just set it and forget it, you’re probably going to be disappointed with the results.

Your autoblogs will be a lot more effective if you also add original website content every once in a while. It’s also a good idea to go in and review the posts that are getting added to your site every so often, just to ensure there isn’t anything you wouldn’t want on the site.

Curated Content

Curation is another hot topic at the moment. This is the process of taking website content from other websites and presenting it as news, along with your own commentary. You can mix in some of your own commentary on snippets of content from other sites.

This works really well when combined with autoblogging. If you set up your autoblogs to create draft posts, you can go in and “curate” the website content that’s getting posted before it goes live on your blog. You’ll still save a lot of time and work compared to doing it all manually, but you’ll also make the autoblogged content more unique (and more useful to your visitors).

Reviews

Reviews also let you reuse website content from other websites, to a certain degree. It works best in markets where there are lots of different products that you can review, especially in markets with a lot of physical products like the ones you’d find on Amazon or eBay.

You can include certain details from the vendor’s website – things like descriptions, specs and so on. But you can add your own spin on it by reviewing the products yourself if you’ve had experience with them, or using reviews from sites like Amazon for research purposes. Use the website content in those other reviews but rewrite and combine them into something new and original.

How to increase website traffic is probably one of the most popular topics in internet marketing. Not just for affiliate sites, but for any type of website. While we can only scratch the surface in this article, we’ll look at few traffic strategies that can work very well.

There are two main types of traffic – free and paid. Google Adwords, banner ads, email advertising and other such things are examples of paid traffic. For the most part, free traffic will be coming via the search engines.

Both types of traffic have pros & cons. You don’t have to spend any money with free methods. This takes more time and effort before you’ll see results, however, on the other hand, paid traffic can come faster and with less up-front effort but you need to be sure that you’re making enough to cover the cost of your traffic.

If you’re interested in increasing website traffic, there are lots of methods for generating it:

- Bum marketing
- Forum posting
- Commenting on blogs
- Mininets
- Guest posts on other blogs

To get free search engine traffic, you need two things – content on your site and backlinks pointing to it. To improve your search rankings and icrease website traffic, you need to keep creating high-value content and building strong backlinks to your site.

You can also get paid traffic in various ways:

- PPC
- Banners
- CPV (Cost Per View)
- Media buys
- Ezine advertising

To make paid traffic work for you, you should start on a small scale and only ramp it up once you know what’s working. If you can create a profitable paid ad campaign, it doesn’t really cost you anything since you’re earning as much or more as you spend. You just need to be careful that you don’t get in too deep before you get some conversion data to work with.

The third (and best) method to increase website traffic is to create it for yourself. You can accomplish this by building an email list.

If you collect opt-ins on your site and build a list of people who you can contact over and over, you can direct traffic to a new article or offer whenever you want. Just send an email to your list and watch the increase of blog traffic that you’ll get.

It’s not quite that simple, of course – you need to build a good relationship with your list first. Doing so will give you a increase of website traffic that isn’t reliant on any other website or company.

You hear the term niche marketing all the time. Many internet marketing training resources recommend going after targeted niches when deciding what you’re promoting. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work particularly well in affiliate marketing, at least not if you want to be able to grow past a certain point. In this article, we’re going to look at some of the things you need to keep in mind when choosing a market.

First, let’s define exactly what a market and a niche is. A niche is a more specific subtopic within a broad overall market, such as anti-aging skin care vs skin care.

Because niches naturally have less competition than the broad markets, a lot of people recommend going after them. While this is true some of the time, other times, doing it this way can result in less than anticipated results leading to no opportunity for growth.

Being able to make multiple related offers to your audience is a critical piece of being successful with affiliate marketing.

If the niche you’re targeting is too highly focused, there may not be enough related, but different offers to interest them.

When you target a broad market, on the other hand, there will be all kinds of offers that are related but fairly unique.

For example, let’s say you were going to target the “lose weight” market. There are all kinds of things you could promote:

- How to lose inches off your waistline
- Healthy recipes
- Exercise programs
- Workout wear
- Exercise machines

Some of these things may be only loosely connected to one another, but someone interested in losing weight would probably be interested in several of them.

Unless you’re planning on building many “mini-sites” on each sub-niche of the main overall niche that you have choosen, then it is a better idea to go more broad on your keyword or keyword phrases.

If you’re worried about the amount of competition you’ll face when you target broad markets like this, here’s one way to work around it.

Start by targeting a more specific niche within the market, but set things up from the start so you can grow with time. Choose a domain name that would work for the broader market and start by focusing on a specific sub-topic. Over time, you can expand your website into other parts of the overall market, as your traffic grows and the site gets some traction.

And if you’re collecting subscribers for an email list (definitely a good idea) you can send them various related information right from the outset to condition them to expect it.

When you’re choosing what affiliate offers you want to promote, one of the things you need to determine is whether you want to work with smaller private programs or stick to the big affiliate networks. Each option has advantages and disadvantages – let’s look at a few of them.

Affiliate networks such as Clickbank, CJ and Shareasale have two main advantages.

1. They have a huge selection of vendors and products to choose from, so you can find something for almost any market.

2. Because the networks handle all your payments, there’s less worry about not receiving them.

The payment issues is more of a concern than you may think, but we’ll talk about that in more detail shortly.

One of the main issues with the bigger affiliate networks is that it’s harder to negotiate with the affiliate managers, and you may even run into trouble getting accepted by some programs.

Because so many affiliates use these networks, you tend to get treated as just another faceless name by many of the affiliate managers, at least until you start generating enough sales that they take notice of you.

You can often get more personal attention with smaller affiliate programs, because they’re often run by the same person who is running all aspects of the business

- If you have questions, you can often get them answered quicker.
- You may be able to get a higher commission rate if you’re sending the vendor a lot of sales.
- You may have more access to the vendor for things like interviews and other promotions.

The biggest caution about these smaller affiliate programs is that there’s no guarantee that they will pay you on time or at all. You can reduce your risk with a little due diligence, however.

First, do some testing on a smaller scale before you jump in with both feet. Ask the vendor a question or two to test their responsiveness, and see how punctual they are at paying your commissions.

Second, check out a few sites like AssociatePrograms.com or AffiliatesDirectory.com and see what other affiliate are saying about them.

You can also use Google to dig up some of the other affiliates who are promoting their offer. Searching for the affiliate referral URLs of any program will often turn up a bunch of sites promoting it.

If you find some of the larger affiliates in your market promoting the offers, chances are they are reliable.

There’s more to picking an affiliate offer to promote than finding a related offer, signing up for their affiliate program and then grabbing your link. That may work in some cases, but you’ll be able to earn a lot more commissions by looking for three specific things.

High Ticket Offers

It just makes sense that earning a commission on a $500 product is going to put more money in your pocket than a commission on a $50 product. Why settle for less when you could be making more on every referred sale?

While you might not have to work as hard to convince someone to spend less money, a lot of it just comes down to market selection and targeting the right audience.

If you set out to target people who are more likely to buy those high ticket products, there really isn’t that much more work involved.

All the things that you do when building a site – keyword selection, site building, content creation – are still necessary either way. Why target products that aren’t going to pay you as much?

Lifetime Commissions

If an affiliate program has multiple offers that you can promote, or that they promote as backend offers to customers you refer, you can make a lot more money. This is particularly valid if they offer lifetime commissions on all the buyers that you refer.

This can be pretty profitable in the long run if you’re working with a vendor that sells lots of related offers. If someone buys something through your affiliate link, they get tagged as “your” customer. From then on, whenever they buy anything else you automatically earn a commission, even if you had nothing to do with that particular offer.

Recurring Commissions

Recurring commissions are one of the most profitable types of offers, because you continue to earn a commission month after month, but you don’t have to do any more work after the initial referral.

These offers include such things as membership sites, recurring services like web hosting or products that automatically ship every month until the customer cancels.

The key things to look for with these offers is how long the typical customer sticks with the recurring sale and how much you’ll earn from the average sale. This will give you an idea of how much you can realistically expect to earn from every successful referral.

And the ultimate affiliate offer is something that includes two or even all of these conditions. If you can find an offer that has a high commission on a recurring sale, and you get lifetime commissions on other products those people buy, you’ve got a winner!

There are lots of strategies for picking niche markets to target. Important factors are often search volume and the number of competing pages in the search engines. These things definitely have a bearing on how easy it’s going to be to get traffic to your website, but before you start looking at any of that kind of data you need to choose your market. Let’s take a quick look at a few things you need to keep in mind when choosing a market.

The absolute first thing you want to determine is whether the market is made up of people who are willing and able to buy. If your website gets a ton of traffic and your offers are unbelievable deals, it won’t matter if your visitors are willing and/or able to spend money.

Look for some other websites in your niche to see what kind of offers they’re promoting. Run some Google searches for keywords in the market and look at how many ads are running. Your local bookstore is also a great source of information – look and see what magazines are targeting your niche market.

If you find many paid ads and other sites that are promoting things in that market, you can be assured that it’s probably a profitable one. If you can’t find many people doing any real promotion, it’s probably best to keep looking.

Once you determine that a market has buyers, another critical factor is how “rabid” those buyers are. “Rabid” meaning how anxious they are to buy.

Rabid niche markets include things like how to make money, how to find a date and how to lose weight. People who are looking for this stuff will often spend hundred or even thousands of dollars in the process.

They’re desperate, impulsive or both.

If you target a market that doesn’t fit this description, it doesn’t mean you’re going to fail but you will probably have to put in more work to get the same results.

Finally, a niche market with a lot of repeat buyers is a good thing. You can increase your profits without having to work harder by going after markets that have recurring purchases, like web hosting or consumable products with automatic replenishment. Every time someone buys a recurring offer, you continue to earn commissions month after month, as long as they continue paying for it.

Affiliate review sites are a great strategy for promoting affiliate offers, but to make the most of them your reviews need to provide real value to your visitors. In this article we’ll look at several ways that you can do that – which will ultimately result in higher commissions for you.

There are a couple of ways to write product reviews. The first – writing reviews for products that you have some personal experience with – is the most effective. This way, you can provide real hands-on reviews that will naturally be more thorough.

The problem is, you may not want to spend the money it would take to buy all the products you want to review, especially if you’re working in a market with a lot of high-ticket items.

Your second choice is to compile information from other people’s reviews and write your own based on that information. That doesn’t mean you should just copy and paste them – use that information to get a feel for the product and then write your own review.

You should cover several things when you write reviews:

- Overview
- Results
- Positives
- Negatives
- Solution

The overview will tell your readers what the product is all about and things like what it does, how much it costs, its specifications and so on. Basically all the stuff you would find in the product description on most sites, for physical products at least.

The results section will outline how the product works for you (or how it worked for other people if you haven’t used it yourself). Discuss the product’s benefits and performance results.

In the positives section you want to talk about all the good things about the product, especially any features that are particularly good.

Including negatives in your review might sound counter-intuitive – after all, if there’s something wrong with it, why would people buy it, right? The fact is, practically any product will have some things that could be improved or might not work quite as advertised.

By disclosing these up front, you’re going to build trust with your readers as well as filter out any buyers who might be disappointed because of those problems. There’s really no advantage to having someone buy a product and then return it because they’re not happy. You still wouldn’t get paid your commission and if you get too many refunds, it can damage your relationship with the seller.

Lastly, the solution section explains exactly what problem the product solves. It can also be used to summarize the rest of the review

Most people tend to think of eBay as a place to sell one thing at a time, perhaps to repeat buyers that you’ve dealt with before. But it can also be used as a lead generation tool to promote affiliate offers. In this article, we’re going to discuss a few strategies for achieving this.

You can promote any type of affiliate offer using these methods. You can promote physical products or you could promote information products from a site like Clickbank. You could even promote eBay’s program by referring people to other auctions.

You can include a flyer or other promotion with every item you sell. You can either find products to sell that will work well for a specific offer or you can find offers related to whatever it is you’re selling.

This flyer can direct people to your website where you can make affiliate offers or even get them to sign up for your email list Or you could use a redirect link to just send them straight to the offer.

You can make the ad a single page flyer or it could even be a multi-page sales letter. There are many ways to approach it.

Think of eBay as a lead generator for a direct mail business. You’re building a list of buyers, you just contact them by mail instead of email. Because you’re already shipping them something they bought, that first contact won’t cost you anything. Just include the flyer along with whatever it is they’ve bought from you.

Whether you choose to follow up with further mailings or not is up to you, and is something you should test to see what kind of conversions it results in.

Let’s look at a quick example. Let’s just say the affiliate offer you’re promoting is in the weight loss market. Create a simple flyer that you can include with all your eBay items.

There are lots of things you could be selling – videos, books, exercise equipment, etc. You could find these things in places like used bookstores and thrift shops, or you could track down a wholesale supplier and sell new ones.

In the flyer, explain the connection with what the customer has bought from you and give them a URL where they’ll get more information. Really no different than any other sales letter or ad.

Offering them a free incentive at your website can make this even more effective. The incentive could be anything – a free report, an ebook, video training and so on. It’s really no different than using incentives to get people to opt into your email list, it’s just offline instead.

When you become an affiliate marketer, you’ll find that certain tools will help you in your online business.

In order to become more proficient in what you do in your business, some tools will become a must have.

Let me lay out a few of these…

First and foremost should be a website. I know, a lot of people, including myself, will tell you that you don’t need one in order to get started – and this is true.

But, once you start building your business, your own website should become a priority.

The reason for this is your assured your own little piece of virtual real estate. Many places like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly, etc, are constantly changing their terms of service. This usually results in blogs, hubs, lenses getting deleted at a moments notice. If this happens to you then there goes all your hard work down the drain.

At least with your own website, you don’t have to worry about things like that.

Another reason for having your own site is having the ability of collecting the names of your visitors to start building your list.

The next thing you need to consider is a good hosting plan.

Hosting plans such as the ones that you find at Host Gator are relatively cheap and you can install multiple sites on one plan.

The next thing you should look at is an auto responder system such as Aweber.

Aweber will cost you about $20 a month, but it’s money that’s well spent. As mentioned above, once you start building your list you need the auto responder to start nurturing that list. If you grow your list large enough, you have assured your self a consistent source of income month to month.

Last but not least, you should invest in a good keyword tool.

IMO, the two best out there are Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder.

I use both of these tools and I have found them to be invaluable. When starting a new campaign or just continuing to build on an existing one, keyword research is vital to the success of that campaign.

So there you have it, some of the tools that you may need to consider.

Now I’m not saying that they’ll be all of the tools that you’ll need, but these will give you a good boost and make your life just a little easier.

Stay Focused on Affiliate Campaigns

You need to stay focused on affiliate campaigns when your launching a new one.

This may sound like a no-brainer to some, but if you are just starting out in affiliate marketing, wasting time can be one of your arch-nemesis.

The longer you’re in affiliate marketing, the more “lists” you’re going to find yourself on. This is not to say that it is wrong to join up to lists – you can get tons of useful information for free in an exchange for an email. Hell, one of your goals as an affiliate marketer should be to build your own list.

What I am saying is this; night after night, you can find yourself doing nothing but opening emails, clinking links, reading about the next greatest piece of software that’s coming out and before you know it, you haven’t gotten a damn thing done the whole night.

Your focus should be on getting certain things done in one day, THEN if you have time you could go through your email and browse.

So what I would suggest (this is actually what I do) is to write down what your goals are for the day, maybe something like:

• Write two 500 word articles for your niche.
• Submit one to Ezine articles.
• Submit one to Articlebase.
• Research 5 more niche keywords for tomorrow’s articles.
• Write a post for your blog.

Go down the list and check off each one that you accomplish.

When your through with the list, you will be surprised at how good you feel because you actually stuck to your guns and accomplished what you set out to do. If you do this day in and day out, it will get you that much closer to you achieving your goal of building a a successful campaign. This ultimately leads you to earning money online which is what we’re in this for, right?

Don’t try to fool yourself into thinking that your going to write four articles the next night and two posts to make up for what you did not do the previous night. This simply does not work. You’ll find yourself falling farther behind and soon procrastination leads to habit and no money made.

One helpful thing you can do to stay focused on affiliate campaigns is no matter how much you want to, do not open your email program at all until your done with your tasks. This will keep you from the temptation.

If your just starting out in affiliate marketing, there is one adage that you will very quickly become acquainted with, and that is “time is money”.

If you waste all yours doing things that are counter-productive, then your going to find yourself chasing your tail around for quite awhile.

Just stay focused on that affiliate campaign and you’ll find yourself making sales in no time.